Bureau of Sabotage
Organization and community: The determinants of insurgent military effectiveness
Thus, I construct a conception of insurgent military effectiveness capturing distinctions such as insurgents’ (in)ability to keep ceasefires or to control who is targeted by violence as well as a theory arguing that it is not the resources organizations have that determine effectiveness, but how well their organizational structure allows them to leverage those resources. In particular, the theory focuses on both informal structures of social support and formal military structures such as logistics, command and control, and personnel management systems in explaining how some insurgent organizations achieve relatively high levels of military effectiveness and others do not. After using a large-N analysis to demonstrate that structural factors are poor predictors of organizational structure and conflict outcomes, I test the theory with in-depth case studies of groups from Vietnam (1940-1975) and Iraq (2003-2016) using archival documents, interviews, and secondary sources.